


get remembered like storms and droughts

by likeadeuce



Category: Footloose (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985)
Genre: College, Dancing, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, Texas, canon relationships are background but not the focus, the 80s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:42:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28036356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: Just a couple (sort of) small town girls crossing paths in the (sort of) big city, and taking the opportunity to dance.
Relationships: Ariel Moore/Claire Standish
Comments: 26
Kudos: 27
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	get remembered like storms and droughts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinetikatrue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinetikatrue/gifts).



> Title and epigraph are from the song "Birthday Boy," recorded by Drive-By Truckers
> 
> Big thanks to horchata for beta reading + jrho & destroythemeek for cheerleading.
> 
> Bomont's location is canonically confusing so I decided to honor the mystery.
> 
> Sorry if Andrew is your fave but I needed to lose someone and he was easiest.

_The pretty girls from the smallest towns/ get remembered like storms and droughts/ that old men talk about for years to come._ \- Mike Cooley

Under normal circumstances, Claire Standish would not have had the nerve to run up to Ariel Moore, wrap her arms around the other girl’s shoulders, and shout, “I just want you to know that I believe you are a goddess!” 

Later, Ariel would joke that they should send whoever was mixing the drinks at the Alpha Delta sorority rush party a thank you note, for getting Claire just the right level of drunk not to worry about whether what she was doing was dignified and proper. 

What Ariel said at the time, though, was, “Sorry, do I know you?” She said it with the kind of precarious smile that could tilt toward ‘amused’ or ‘pissed off,’ depending on what happened next.

So when Claire threw her hands up and managed to say, between giggles, “No! I’m pretty sure you don’t!” Ariel gave in to Claire’s infectious laughter.

Ariel leaned down and spoke directly into Claire’s ear so that she didn’t have to compete with Chaka Khan singing _This Is My Night_. “I think maybe you need some air.” 

“You’re Ariel from dance class,” Claire explained. “I’m Claire.”

“Well, you need some air, Claire.” 

Claire nodded vigorous agreement, then kept repeating, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” as Ariel helped her stand and walk across the room. 

When they made it outside under the crackling porch light, Ariel got a better look at Claire’s round cherub face and bright red hair. “Oh! Yes, you took my first Texas two-step class last semester.”

Claire scrunched up her face and admitted, “Melinda McGrath said we should all take a dance class to be ready for -- for -- .” The word ‘rush’ was escaping her so she said, “sorority tryouts. Like this!” She waved back at the crowded room they’d just left where lots of people were flailing around wildly but nobody was displaying trained dance moves, not even something as simple as the two-step. 

“Who the hell’s Melissa McGrath?” asked Ariel, in a way that Claire found gratifying. 

“Doesn’t matter.” Melinda was Claire’s roommate, who had taken on herself the role of social director for their hall: making sure everyone got in a good sorority and didn’t go out with the wrong guys or otherwise embarrass her. It had ended up being distressingly like high school. The University of Texas at Austin certainly should have felt bigger than Shermer High, but the Melindas of the world were determined to make sure it didn’t.

Ariel cast a look back at the party room. “Seems like a waste of dance moves, to be honest. Trying to impress these --” She waved her hands in a way that seemed to take in everything. These preppies, these princesses, this everything that Claire had worked hard to convince herself would be the most essential part of her college experience. Now Ariel was smiling at Claire, just taking it for granted that none of it meant very much.

“You’re not going to pledge?” Claire asked. “So you just came for the watery beer and the extremely uninteresting boys?”

“I was thinking about leaving,” Ariel admitted. “Not sure it’s my scene. But then this redhead came and grabbed me and called me a goddess and I had to see what that was all about.”

“Oh,” Claire laughed, “Oh. Well, you know. Melinda and most of that crew quit after the tryout class but a couple of us stuck with it because we liked the instructor so much. Who was, well, you. That’s why I said you’re a goddess. Like -- like -- what’s she called -- the dance muse. Terpsichord?”

Now Ariel laughed and gave the word four syllables when she suggested, “Terp-si-chor-e? You’re in Hirschfeld’s classics lecture too, aren’t you?” Claire had no recollection of seeing Ariel in a classroom; the auditorium was huge and even five-foot-ten blondes with athletic goddess bodies weren’t completely unique. They were, after all, in Texas. “I’m usually in the back,” Ariel added. Of course this dance goddess would sit in the back of the auditorium, like a cool kid in the rear of the bus, and yet still remember the quiz answers better than eager, early-arriving Claire did. “I see you up front though.” Ariel took one of Claire’s bright red curls between her fingers and examined it closely. “You’re hard to miss.” 

Then Ariel stood up, reached out a hand, and said, “If you want to go dancing in Austin tonight, I can show you a better place than this.”

“Yes,” Claire said, “absolutely yes.” Ariel Moore could be her muse any time.

*

Ariel always knew she would go to college far away from Bomont. Not so long ago, she swore she was going to pack up one night and just take off by herself. She had grand plans to apply in secret, get accepted, and slip away on a Greyhound bus. Once Ariel got to where she was going, she would find a job and pay her own way. If her parents figured out where she had got to, so be it. She would never let the dust of that horrible town pollute her thoughts again. 

Now she was heading for Austin, a thirteen-hour trip, in her parents’ car. They left before dawn, and the Reverend insisted on driving the whole way himself. 

“I can drive, Dad,” Ariel protested when they stopped for gas at the New Mexico border. They had been on the road for less than four hours and he already looked tired. “I’m a safe driver,” she added. True, she had charmed her way out of more than one serious speeding ticket, sometimes by invoking her status as Shaw Moore’s daughter. But she was a skilled driver, only reckless on purpose, and she could certainly make a point of driving safely with her parents in the car.

Ariel’s mother put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not you,” Vi Moore promised. “You know your father just has to drive. He and I have been having this argument for twenty-five years. I’ll sit in the back if you want.” 

She knew Mom meant this as an offer to switch seats so that Ariel could sit in the front, but pretended she didn’t. So Ariel said, “Sure,” and got into the sedan’s rear passenger side instead. Now Dad looked like their chauffeur and Ariel hoped he felt a bit silly about being so stubborn. But he didn’t say anything, just turned back on the Book-on-Tape that had been playing since Bomont. It was _Life on the Mississippi_ by Mark Twain, not really Ariel’s idea of a good time. But Mom had convinced him to save Billy Graham’s devotionals for the trip home, and the Talking Bible for after dinner. Ariel would vastly have preferred the tapes stacked in her luggage -- Duran Duran and George Michael and good old Kenny Loggins -- but she’d spent her graduation money on a killer boom box and she could play those songs out her dorm room window any time she wanted, for the impossibly long forever of life at college.

Meanwhile, she sat in the back while Dad laughed at some baffling joke about steamboats, and Mom rubbed his neck. Ariel wondered how “Your father’s never let me drive on a road trip for twenty-five years,” was supposed to make the situation okay, and as much as she loved them (and she did, she did, she did love them) she vowed that this was never going to be her.

In Amarillo, they stopped and Ariel bought postcards. She picked one with a jackalope on the front and wrote to Ren, who had headed back to Chicago a month ago to work a construction job with his cousin. _Do older women still buy you drinks when you go out dancing?_ She added a little smiley face, wanting him to know she didn’t mind. (Ariel and Ren had done it a few times, before he left town, but being with him always felt less like love than like play; it was an extension of their dancing. The fights Ariel had about sex -- with her father, with God, and with herself -- were lost and won by the time she ever thought about going to bed with Ren McCormack). 

She got another postcard of the Cadillac Ranch and in the fading light she made it out to Rusty. Rusty, who was studying to be a nurse’s aide at a community college twenty minutes from Bomont, still sleeping under her parents’ roof, when she couldn’t get away with sleeping at Willard’s. Rusty who lived for smalltown life, and smalltown boys, and whose feet never seemed to get restless.

Ariel was fast asleep when they pulled into Austin. 

Her parents took one bed in the double room at Howard Johnson. Ariel took the other and tried to sleep with the pillow over her head while Dad watched the Astros game. The next day, they got up early to move her into the dorm, and Dad was ready to go home by 10 AM. Mom said not to be foolish, they had never spent a day in Austin before, and they could drive halfway home and stay in Amarillo overnight. Part of Ariel was fully ready to get rid of them -- meet her new roommates, begin the rest of her life. 

(Ariel had never been a new girl before. She couldn’t remember what it was like to step into a classroom or a church or a grocery store that wasn’t packed with people who remembered her from nursery school. People who knew her mama and her daddy -- especially her daddy -- and who talked about her dead big brother like they knew him better than she ever had.)

A possibly larger part of Ariel was grateful that Mom wasn’t ready to drive off. They took a walk downtown, had some very good tacos, and listened to Dad read, out loud, from trivial aspects of the student handbook. Ariel kept waiting for something to happen, for a meaningful conversation that recognized the life-changing weight of the moment. Instead, they talked about class registration processes. Dad kept asking whether she had rolls of quarters for laundry, and Mom kept pursing her lips and trying to figure out what precisely was in this picante sauce that made it taste like Texas.

Three o’clock in the afternoon rolled around, and they all hugged goodbye. That was when Dad drew in his breath and Ariel wondered what could be coming. “Let me know if you need help finding a church,” he said. “There are people in town I can call.”

Ariel looked him in the eye and wondered if she needed to repeat what she had said to him when they fought before the dance last spring. _I don’t know that I believe in everything you believe._ She didn’t need to repeat it. She saw the knowledge in his eyes. This wouldn’t be the blowout that fight had been. “I will let you know if I need help with that,” she said carefully. “I will do my best.”

Dad nodded. Mom hugged her and said, “I know you will. Now. Never be afraid to call your old mom. Make smart choices. And whatever you do, don’t forget where you came from.”

Now that? That, Ariel could promise. 

The whole point of coming here was to forget where she came from. Now she understood that she never would. Ariel could get as far from Bomont as her dreams or the Reverend’s Chevy Caprice could take them. But forgetting where she came from was impossible.

*

Ariel didn’t exactly fail out of sorority rush, but Alpha Delta did not invite her back, and that felt like a sign.

Claire was a bit glummer about it. “Melinda is not happy with me,” she moaned over dining hall coffee.

“Tell me you were having more fun at that party than we had at the Painted Pony and I’ll apologize to Melissa myself.”

“I can’t even pretend I was having fun before I saw you,” Claire admitted. The smile she gave Ariel was shy and happy at once, like she wasn’t used to showing it off for just anyone. “But I’ve been planning all this time to join a sorority and, if I don’t do that -- if I don’t even want to do that -- then what am I doing with the next four years?”

Ariel summoned a vivid memory of buzzy-eyed Claire taking to the floor at the country and western bar. She wasn’t a skilled dancer, but when she raised her hands in the air, snapped her fingers, and showed teeth that glowed white in the disco ball light, Ariel couldn’t imagine a heart in Texas that wasn’t waiting for Claire Standish to break it.

“That’s easy,” Ariel said. “You do anything you want.”

* 

Claire’s life plan, when she was sixteen and stuck in Saturday detention, didn’t involve Texas. But that was part of the problem. Her plan didn’t amount to much of anything except not being where her parents wanted her to be, and not dating who they wanted her to date. John Bender took care of the second part, for a little while, but when the penny dropped and her folks really were getting a divorce, the first part turned into a mess. Deciding to go with Mom to California would piss off Dad, but it would please Mom way too much; ditto staying in Shermer with Dad, and that had the added drawback of staying in Shermer. 

She had always said that if it got to be too much she would go live with her brother in Houston, where at twenty-eight he already had a house with a yard and a dog and a wife who tried a little too hard (but not in an unpleasant way) to be the big sister Claire never had. This was supposed to piss both parents off equally, but they took way too easily to the idea of her going to stay with Chip and Karen. Dad was thrilled he could sell the house in Shermer and get an apartment in the City. Mom liked planning a jetset life without accommodating a teenage daughter.

Claire had thought she was bluffing her folks in order to play them against each other, but suddenly she was getting shipped to Texas. Well, what the hell. Claire had wanted a chance to shed the person she was in Shermer, anyway, and a suburb was a suburb. Houston would be hotter, and the hair would be bigger, but there were malls. And after a year of that, she could go to college.

Claire did her best to paint the move as a big adventure when she discussed it with her classmates. Maddy from pep squad had a VHS copy of ‘Urban Cowboy’ that a bunch of them had rewatched many times, supposedly to make fun of it. But John Travolta was still pretty hot back then and Claire’s friends at least pretended to be excited about the idea of her landing in class-divided sexual tension with a guy in a black-collared shirt and Wranglers. Meanwhile, when they all made elaborate plans to call and write and visit, Claire pretended to think it would happen. She had experienced other friends (had they been friends?) moving away over the years and she knew how it went. Not that she blamed anyone for unanswered letters or disconnected phones. She didn’t want to think about Shermer when she left it, either.

One thing she did was this: setting aside half a page in her yearbook which she headed in cheerful loopy writing with “The Breakfast Club.” On the last day of school, she tracked down each of the others and asked them to sign. “Oh also,” Claire added, making it an afterthought, “Put down your contact info there, if you want. So, you know -- we said we’d all stay in touch.”

Andrew wrote in cramped, barely legible script, _Yo C, I’ll never forget about serving time with you!_ and handed it back. “You have my number,” he pointed out, a grudging dig at the fact she’d never used it, and all the subtext that implied. Claire didn’t push it. She didn’t need more Andrew in her life anyway, and he’d been kind of a shit to Allison.

Brian was flattered and nervous. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, grinned, asked, “Are you sure?” and then wrote his entire mailing address in his studied, cheerful print. “I’m not allowed to call long distance,” he explained, “But if you write me, I’ll write you back. Your correspondent in Shermer,” he said with a sheepish dimple.

“I’ll do that.” Claire gave him an impulsive hug. He didn’t ask for her address, and she didn’t offer. He’d never write first -- she wouldn’t really want him to -- but she remembered the clarity and power of his words, in that silly essay they'd had to write that had ended up less silly in his hands. 

Allison laughed in delight at Claire’s request. Then she disappeared for twenty minutes with the yearbook and came back to display a full page drawing in colored marker, an elaborate portrait of all of them that day in the library, geared up in armor with Mr. Vernon as the dragon they had to keep out of the library/ castle. “Oh my God!” said Claire. “I will frame this, I swear.” Across the bottom of the picture, Allison had signed her name and written her phone number. Claire thought she might actually use it.

And then there was John. She showed up at his uncle’s auto shop, because he hadn’t been seen in school since his eighteenth birthday. 

“A yearbook?” John demanded. He wiped his hands with a rag, then leaned one arm against the hood of a car he’d been working on. His crooked grin broadcast that he thought this was just an excuse to see him. That might have been true, but she wanted him to see the drawing, too. 

“Allison drew this of all of us. The breakfast club.” She held it in front of him, keeping an eye on his greased hands. “I thought you’d like to see it.” 

“Ummm.” He looked disinterested, then interested in spite of himself. “Were you ever gonna tell me about Texas?” At first she thought he’d read something about her move in the book, until he added, “I heard from Johnson.” 

Yes, of course. He and Brian had started hanging out, improbably enough. 

“I’m telling you now,” said Claire. “I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”

“Don’t tell me you’ll write. Or call. I don’t need you pretending to care about my feelings.” 

John Bender with his fucking melodrama. “I wasn’t going to tell you that. But I didn’t want to leave things off without --” She didn’t want to start this again, because he’d just say that she had dropped him when she didn’t care about pissing off her parents anymore, and she would let him think that (or let him say he thought that) because they hadn’t had the kind of relationship that deserved a more thorough post-mortem. He’d taken her virginity, and she wasn’t sorry, but it wasn’t as though it had been true love for him, either.

“I’ll see you around,” she said, which was absolute nonsense. He wrote “BENDER” in big block letters, next to the picture Allison had drawn of him. He didn’t write his address, but it wasn’t like Claire didn’t know where he would stay.

*

Ariel talked to Ren every Sunday at ten-thirty AM. They took turns calling and never missed a week. It was a reason for both of them to get up after a night of studying, or working late, or going to a party. It was also Ariel’s admission that she wasn’t going to find a church.

“I tried,” she admitted, looping the phone cord around her wrist. “It’s not like there’s a lack of options. Austin may be a big city --” Ren gave a not-entirely-respectful Chicago boy laugh. “Hush, you. Austin is about as much as I can take after a lifetime in Bomont. But it’s still Texas. There are more churches than you can shake a stick at. And on campus you can’t turn around without tripping over some Christian fellowship or Campus Crusade. I even went to a few meetings for one of the less scary-seeming ones but. . .”

“But not exactly your scene? Did they find out about your past as a rebellious preacher’s daughter?”

“They loved me. Red cowboy boots and all. They were just thrilled I’d chosen to spend time away from the big scary world and all the --” She put the next part in audible air quotes. “Liberal indoctrination.” 

“They wanted pretty girls for the recruitment poster,” Ren teased her. He leaned into flirtation sometimes, to see if she would answer in kind, from a safe distance. 

“This is UT,” she said, “They’ve got the prettiest girl from every small town in a five-state area. The church people weren’t phony or gross or anything. I think they were all trying to be nice but -- I guess I thought I’d be able to go into a church this far from home and try to love it for what it was, without all the Bomont baggage. But it turned out --”

She let the words hang there. For holiday break, she’d taken her first ever airplane flight home, cried her eyes out over seeing her little cousins in the Christmas pageant, and then admitted to Mom and Dad that she didn’t have a church in Austin. That she wasn’t planning to look.

“It turned out,” Ren suggested, “that the hometown baggage was what made it matter in the first place.”

“Yeah.” She let out a heavy sigh.

“So does that mean dancing’s no fun anymore, with nothing to rebel against?”

“You shut your mouth, Ren McCormack.”

“So you’ve found a place to go dancing?”

“Oh, Ren.” Ariel laughed. “You have no idea.

“Is that a fact?” he said. “I might have to come and see.”

*  
Brian Johnson, once Claire’s correspondent in Shermer, had graduated to “correspondent in Evanston,” where he was studying aerospace engineering at Northwestern. Allison was in the NU visual arts school, and they seemed to hang around each other a lot. Claire was pretty sure that it wasn’t a romantic thing, but Brian’s letters frequently included a sketch from Allison. Sometimes the sketch was of Brian, and occasionally John was in there too, though Claire didn't know whether John Bender’s presence on the NU campus was all in Allison’s imagination or if he really hauled his ass to Evanston to spend time with them. Maybe he was picking up girls. 

Claire wasn’t much of a writer and definitely wasn’t an artist, and knew she didn’t do an adequate job of keeping up her end. She tried to buy the silliest pre-printed greeting cards to make up for her own lack of originality. Sometimes she’d add, _Say hi to John,_ just to see if it would draw a comment. _John says hi,_ Brian would write in the subsequent letter. 

It wasn’t as though he had gone anywhere. It wasn’t as though she had lost his number.

Anyway, Claire had been busy. It turned out college had a lot to offer; dropping out of the sorority gauntlet early made her world bigger, not smaller. Melinda was pissy over it for about a week, then turned out to have her own stuff to worry about. The other girls weren’t trying to run Claire’s life; they were busy with their own.

Claire abandoned her trademark pink lipstick and got an extra piercing in the cartilage of her right ear. She tried black eyeliner, and Ariel snapped Polaroids that she could send to Allison: _Sorry I made you wipe yours off! This stuff is fun!_ Then the next day she tried bright red lip color and switched out her contacts for funky glasses. Ariel celebrated all of it. Ariel hugged her around the shoulders. Claire and Ariel smoked too much and sat around the quad with their friends arguing about whether Cyndi Lauper was a Madonna ripoff or was doing her own thing. They went out dancing every weekend.

Not that college was all about fun. Claire had to get at least a B in accounting to apply to the business school, and while she had always been good at math, sorting numbers into debits and credits stressed her out. “Someone never had to save up for her own little pink twinsets, hmm?” Ariel teased. 

“I don’t wear twinsets,” protested Claire, who had taken all of her pastel colored cardigans home over Christmas break and bought (okay, guilted her mom into buying her) an oversized aviator jacket. Still, she got Ariel’s point. Ariel had been saving her own money since she started babysitting at age 11, and she could not only manage a balance sheet but explain it better than Claire’s accounting TA could. Ariel was looking at the business school track, too, with a goal of opening her own dance studio. After a semester of teaching the student union classes, she had been offered a well-paying job in dance aerobics at an upscale gym, but she much preferred her after school volunteer shift working with local students.

“This is kind of silly,” Ariel said one day. “But are you interested in coming to see my kids’ dance recital on the 15th? I know that’s over spring break and I don’t want to ask you to give it up but it’s probably just as fun to hang around Austin --”

Some of the kids in her dorm were heading to Galveston for a week at the beach, but Claire had not entirely been looking forward to it. Still, she wasn’t prepared for how much Ariel’s invitation thrilled her. “I didn’t have any plans,” Claire said. “Or, I sort of did but to be honest whatever you’re planning is gonna be more fun. Dancing kiddos and all.”

Ariel broke into a relieved smile. “Confession time: I scheduled this over our break and decided to make a big deal over it so that I had a good excuse not to go back to Bomont. But! Rusty heard and she and Willard are gonna make the drive. I’d love you to meet them.” Ariel hesitated for a moment and then said. “My friend Ren, too. He’s gonna come down for Chicago. It’s kind of all just a big excuse for us to go dancing in Austin, I think.” Ariel always made a point of saying ‘my friend Ren’ in a way that made Claire understand they’d been more than friends. She didn’t call him her ex, though, which maybe meant he was still a friend or still. . . 

This gave Claire a complicated feeling for a second and then she said, “Oh! Chicago! If it’s a problem forget I even asked, but I have a couple friends at Northwestern, and we’ve been talking about. . .I mean If Ren’s planning to drive down, that might make it easier, they could save on gas --”

Ariel’s eyes lit up. “Perfect! We can all go out dancing together.”

*  
The crew pulled up in a clunky old Dodge with Illinois plates that must have belonged to Ren. Before the car had fully stopped, the rear passenger door opened, and Allison jumped out. Her backpack bounced and she almost tripped over her Doc Martens, all in her hurry to run and hug Claire. “Missed you so much,” Allison mumbled, and then she raised a finger to trace Claire’s black eyeliner. “I knew you’d like it if you tried it.”

The car doors slammed, and an unfamiliar voice called, “Wait ‘til I park next time.” But the voice carried a kind laugh. Claire looked up to see a slim, smiling boy with close cropped hair and a white T-shirt over tight jeans. That had to be Ariel’s Ren, and Claire tried not to be jealous when Ariel ran and jumped to wrap her legs around him. He’d been Ariel’s favorite dance partner, that was all it was now. Plus, jealousy was dumb. Ariel was allowed to have friends.

Speaking of . . . Claire leaned against Allison and yelled, “Hey, Brain, what’s the holdup?” Because Brian had gotten out of the front passenger door but still stood there. 

Allison cleared her throat and said, “I thought they should tell you but -- one more person to split gas?” 

The long trenchcoat came into view before John Bender did, which gave Claire time to compose her face. “Don’t get mad at John,” said Brian, “It was a last minute thing and we’re gonna stay with one of my Shermer buddies on West Campus.” 

John gave an elaborate shrug. “There’s a whole story about checking out a classic Camaro my uncle wants to buy and maybe driving it home. But it’s boring and honestly I made half of it up. But I won’t be in your hair if you don’t want me in your hair.”

“It’s fine!” Claire assured them, and it turned out than when she thought about it, it mostly was. 

“All right!” Ren clapped his hands. He had a diabolical camp counselor energy, Claire decided, despite the cool boy in tight jeans look, and it turned out she liked it. Or maybe she just liked the way Ariel mirrored his smile. Her smile wasn’t _for_ this boy, but he brought it out in her. 

“Now!” Ren said. “You must be Claire, and this is Ariel, so we all know each other. It’s been a long trip and I don’t blame you if some of you want to nap.” (Claire had ‘known’ Ren McCormack for about thirty seconds and already suspected he’d never had a nap in his life.) “But I’m gonna go over to the school with Ariel and help her set up for the big performance tonight. So if anybody else is coming --”

The breakfast club all looked at Claire, and she nodded, “Of course. We’re going.”

“Excellent.” Ren rubbed his hands together. “We should have some downtime, and Ariel’s bringing the tunes. Because we’re all going to hit the town tonight and I heard an ugly rumor that some of y’all need to learn how to dance.”

The breakfast club all looked at Claire again. As she had suspected, doing silly dances when they were stoned in the library was one thing, but this. . .

“Cool!” said Allison.

“What?” said Brian.

“No way,” said John. “I did not agree to this.” Then he turned a suspicious eye on Claire. “What are you grinning about?”

“Y’all do what you want,” she said, but then she slid her arm through Ariel’s. “We’re going to dance.”

*  
Ariel lay across the junior high stage, stretched on her stomach, and looked out over the gymnasium. Ren had lined Claire’s friends up -- even the tall trenchcoat guy was semi-participating -- and was showing them a basic step and turn. “You have to understand,” Ariel said to Claire. “This is not the toughest dance-related situation Ren and I have had to deal with.”

“It’s true.” Rusty closed her lips around a Tootsie Pop, took a long suck, and then pulled it from her mouth again. “Ren worked his magic on Willard here.” She poked her boyfriend on the shoulder. 

“It weren’t magic,” Willard drawled. “Just, you know.” He started tapping the stage with one finger. “Finding the beat.” Calling the pattern that Willard had found a ‘beat’ of any kind seemed overly generous, but Ariel knew how proud Ren had been of teaching him. Anyway, Willard had gotten past his shyness and would go out on the dance floor with Rusty now. Seeing the two of them happy was all that Ariel really cared about. 

Honestly, even as a dance teacher, she thought that was the most important part. She was never going to care about training kids to win competitions, or to become professional dancers. Back before she knew Ren, Ariel had danced to get rid of her anger. Now she knew how to dance for joy. Both of those reasons mattered. She wanted the kids she taught to know that too.

“Hey, Claire.” Ariel stood. “I forgot a couple other things in the car. Do you want to come help?” Rusty looked up, but Ariel shook her head. “You two stay put, you look so dang cozy.” Ariel winked and spun on her boot heels.

When they were outside, Ariel said, “I didn’t really need anything from the car.”

“You’re kidding.” When Claire raised her eyebrows, Ariel realized she hadn’t been very subtle.

“I just wanted to make sure this was all right. I didn’t mean to monopolize your friends with my silliness.”

“You keep saying that, but it’s not silly at all.” Claire looked up at her, and then hastily looked down again. “I’m jealous you’ve got something you love this much.”

Ariel let the words hang in the air for a moment, and then she said, “Just so it’s clear, I’m not with Ren.”

“I didn’t mean Ren,” Claire said. Again, a bit too quickly.

“Not anymore,” Ariel admitted. Carefully, she said, “There’s not anything with you and John?”

“Noooooooo,” Claire assured her. “But, I guess there was. For a while. So, good call. Most people had trouble imagining the two of us together even when we -- sort of -- were.” She cleared her throat. “Did I tell you that we all met in detention?”

“Detention!” 

“Don’t sound so shocked. Are you telling me you were never in detention?” 

“Oh, I was probably supposed to be at some point.” Ariel tossed her hair. “But if so I just didn’t go. I’d let the principal deal with my mom and dad. Way to punish all three of them.” She rarely talked about Bomont, but with everybody here today it was hard not to think about it. “I can’t really imagine you locked up after school, though.”

“Worse, it was Saturday morning. That’s why we say ‘the breakfast club.’”

“ Were you there to chase the bad boys?”

“Not on purpose. It worked out that way a little, though.” Claire narrowed her eyes. “Did you chase bad boys, Ariel Moore?”

“Are you kidding?” She leaned close and whispered. “Back home, the bad boys chased me.”

Claire looked into her eyes for a long time, then pressed her lips together and finally spoke. “I have trouble imagining you in your small town sometimes. But somehow I can imagine that.” After another moment’s silence, Claire said, “Do you think you’ll go back? This summer or . . .?”

Ariel had considered inviting her parents to come for the recital but it seemed silly. As for the summer, there would be jobs at Bomont’s fast food joints, or there would be well-paid classes she could teach in Austin. “I haven’t had the nerve to talk to my parents about it,” she admitted. “I was going to come here and never look back but now I don’t know.”

“I don’t even have a home to go back to,” Claire said. “My parents live on different coasts, my brother’s in Houston but that’s not where I grew up. I know the breakfast club thing might seem a little goofy, but they’re the only connection I have now at all. At least your town’s still there.”

“Yeah,” Ariel said softly. “Maybe when I have someone to take back there with me. . . but that’s well. Complicated and. . .” She stood then, offered Claire a hand, and said. “I don’t want to think about that right now. So --” Claire clasped her palm. “You want to come in and show those suburban slackers how we dance in Austin?”

Claire got to her feet, facing Ariel. She stayed there, just for a second, but long enough for Ariel to feel her breath. Then Claire leaned in and pressed her lips softly to Ariel’s. Then they went inside. And Claire put her hands on Ariel’s shoulders. And they showed the smalltown kids, the suburban slackers, and one footloose boy from Chicago, how they had learned to dance in Austin.


End file.
